The seventh chapter argues that Lutfullah Khan’s critical views on empire went viral after he left Britain in 1844, as he garnered positive reviews in London magazines commenting on the 1857 Indian mutiny. Published in June of that year and edited by his friend and former employer, Captain Edward Backhouse Eastwick, Autobiography of Lutfullah, a Mohamedan Gentleman encodes the two men’s divergent politics: a Company conservative who campaigned against Crown rule in India and a munshi patriot perceived by the Victorian press as opposing a belligerent Company. By integrating picaresque fictions on Indian thugs, the memoir enabled periodical readers to imagine retrospectively the transition from a Mughal Empire under the Company’s inept custodianship to direct rule under Victoria. Her 1858 proclamation that the feelings of the natives of India were to be henceforth respected was felt by Lutfullah’s readers before these feelings congealed into a new ruling ideology. Autobiography shows that the nation state’s attempt to repair its intimate relationship with Asian subjects was mediated by those subjects’ struggle to claim a stake in the national body.

The epilogue ponders how the media reorientations that vexed Central and South Asian travelers to pre-1857 Britain sedimented over time, exposing an impotency latent in the discursive power formation now known as orientalism. The classic case study is James Morier’s Hajji Baba novels, which I interpret as satires against the English dandies and damsels who adopted Persian dress and demeanor to display social exclusivity rather than against Iranians like Abul Hassan Khan: the Persian ambassador whom Morier hosted in England in 1809–1810 and 1819. The ambassador’s queering in the English news circuit prompted Morier, a social climber anxious to claim masculine gentility, to project Londoners’ transculturation in Qajar fashions onto an Iran wallowing in Regency effeminacy – the Anglo-Persian dandy whose uncertain sexual orientation recoils on the British empire’s homosocial gentlemen.